[Codenarc-developer] A M.Sc. thesis on CodeNarc (in progress) - any suggestions?

[Artur G. <art...@gm...>]

Hi Guys!

As you might have seen, I've recently done
two<https://github.com/CodeNarc/CodeNarc/pull/12> pull
requests <https://github.com/CodeNarc/CodeNarc/pull/13> to CodeNarc, both
containing a rule implementation. There are more to come, as I am doing a
M.Sc. thesis on CodeNarc. In my thesis I'd like to focus on implementing
some feature requests (mainly: new rules). Which feature requests I'll
implement is not sealed yet (and probably won't be until I finish my
thesis... :)), and I'd like to ask you for direction in this matter.

Are there any feature requests that you would especially like implemented
in the first place? What would the users benefit from the most?
If time allows me (I'd like to defend the thesis in July; September is - I
think - the last possible deadline...) I'll be more than happy to follow
any of your advice.

BTW: I've got some ideas for new features as well. Most of them are new
rules and I'll probably add some feature requests for them soon. There is,
however, one (bolder) proposal I'd like to discuss with you as soon as
possible: gathering statistical information on CodeNarc's usage.

I think it would be great to somehow measure how popular rules are, how
often they get @SuppressWarnings, how often they are violated and how these
numbers change over time. Also, how is CodeNarc run (ant task, Sonar
analysis, IDE plugin, command line, etc...). Another idea is to gather some
code snippets around violations and suppresions (by default off, if one
agrees - by default obfuscated). I feel that all this information can be a
great guide for CodeNarc maintainers (and analysing it for rules
implemented by me would be a great addition to my thesis :)).

I would be very happy to implement such a feature for CodeNarc, but - due
to aforementioned time constraints - am hesitant to undertake the effort if
I there is not hope that we'll gather some data that I could use in my
thesis. Otherwise I'd like to focus on implementing new rules. Could you
shed some light on how fast new versions of CodeNarc are adopted (and,
therefore, how fast we can get any data at all)? I think, according to this
SO thread<http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8874670/maven-detailed-download-statistics-for-artifacts-of-public-repositories-like>you
should have such data available.

Best regards,
Artur Gajowy

P.S. The seed of all this was planted by Hamlet D'Arcy during a
hackergarten on the first edition of 33rd Degree
<http://33degree.org>(Cracow, Poland, two years ago), where we drank
beer and made an attempt to
implement EqualsOverloadedRule. The commit is
here<https://github.com/CodeNarc/CodeNarc/commit/3320a8>.
Just thought you'd like to know :)